Angelo’s Italy is the 3rd generation of Giardinelli family owned restaurants, the first 2 were in Rome, Italy. I grew up in a house full of relatives. As a child I remember wondering why our food was always ready on the table and no one was ever cooking. One day I discovered that we had a little restaurant just below our house where my mother and grandmother cooked and my aunts attended the tables. when the Tiber River flooded Rome we had to close the restaurant and move altogether in one big house. It was there that I was introduced to great homemade Italian food. There was a big kitchen with a large marble table and a special wood stove for cooking called Cucina Economica, (Economic Stove). Every day my grandmother , my mother, and 2 aunts started to cook very early in the morning. I still remember waking up to the delicious smell of their home cooking. Everything was done there in that big cucina: bread, pasta, jams, sauces from fresh tomatoes , and many home canned vegetables. The only things we bought from the grocery were milk and sugar. Everything else came to our house from my grandma’s town, Avezzano, in Abruzzo. A farmer from there would come to our house with bags and bags of good fresh food: oil, wine, flour, eggs, live chickens, fruit, and veggies. No one had a fridge those days and the food was immediately processed by the women in the house. I watched what they did with amazement. They were fast and every one of them knew exactly what their duty was. There I had my first kitchen job. My grandmother had a small box with a hole and a light in it. My job was to check every egg through that hole against the light. If I saw a little black spot I would reject the egg, otherwise I would put the good ones in separate baskets. While all that was going on, the farmer patiently waited, hat in hands. I would spend hours just watching them cooking. They never tasted the food to see if it was cooked, they just looked at it, smelled it, and then they would say: “This is ready”. They didn’t teach me how to cook: I just watched them, the way they mixed the spices, the way they cooked sauces and meats, the way they boiled pasta etc. It’s amazing how when I started to cook everything came back to me. That was my culinary school - my mother Lucia and grandmother Angela, were my teachers and I still do things the way they did. Some of the dishes may be a little different from what you’re used to - I do things the traditional Italian way & strive to always use authentic imported genuine ingredients or buy local. We do not deep fry and we only cook with Extra Virgin Olive oil imported from Italy. Incidentally, people think that Italian cooking is done with lots of garlic but it’s not so. We put the right amount of spices in our food but if you want extra garlic we’ll be happy to please you. P.S my wife & eldest son Allen, an accomplished jazz guitarist, plays weekend evenings if he’s not gigging elsewhere.
Angelo's Italy